for people who have the habit of opening unreal files that are on another computer on a network, and are having this problem here with UE 5.1:
“Failed to open descriptor file”
I’ll leave here the solution I found, very simple. You just have to go to the folder where your project is, right-click and select the option “Map network drive”
You will choose the letter of the drive you want to create, leave the option “Reconnect at sign-in” checked and click on finish.
Windows will create a location as if it were a drive on the computer itself, opening the file through that drive I no longer had the “Failed to open descriptor file” problem, everything worked correctly.
Yes, for dummies
I had the same error but in different situation, I was working locally on my PC, not in network. Opening the uproject file directly worked, but when I launched Local Windows Debugger in Visual Studio then the error occured.
I managed to fix my problem the “hard way”
I removed the .sln and .vsconfig files and removed the directories: .vs, Binaries, DerivedDataCache, Intermediate and Saved.
Then I generated Visual Studio files again and it works now
Yes I know, this was brute force but I got the job done